Page:Mahatma Gandhi, his life, writings and speeches.djvu/357

 spirit to do honour to one who by her race, qualities of courage, devotion, and self-sacrifice has so signally justified and fulfilled the high traditions of Indian womanhood.

I believe I am one of the few people now back in India who had the good fortune to share the intimate homelife of Mr. and Mrs. Gandhi in England: and I cherish two or three memories of this brief period in connection with the kindly and gentle lady, whose name has become a household word in our midst with her broken health and her invincible fortitude—the fragile body of a child and the indomitable spirit of a martyr.

I recall my first meeting with them the day after their arrival in England. It was on a rainy August afternoon last year that I climbed the staircase of an ordinary London dwelling house to find myself confronted with a true Hindu idol of radiant and ascetic simplicity. The great South African leader who, to quote Mr. Gokhale's apt phrase, had moulded heroes out of clay, was reclining, a little ill and weary, on the floor eating his frugal meal of nuts and fruit (which 1 shared) and his wife was busy and content as though she were a mere modest house-wife absorbed in a hundred details of household service, and not the world-famed heroine of a hundred noble sufferings in a nation's cause.

I recall too the brilliant and thrilling occasion